Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985): Cultural and Historical Context Lisa Jadwin Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been both controversial and influential in the decades since its publication. The novel reached best-seller status in the mid-1980s and has continued to sell well in North America and abroad and has been translated into more than thirty-five languages, including Chinese and Serbo-Croatian (“Poised”). The Handmaid’s Tale has been made into a feature-length film, an opera, a full-cast radio adaptation, and a stage play. Perhaps most important, it has been introduced to many young readers in secondary and postsecondary English and language-arts curricula across the United States and Canada. The Handmaid’s Tale has been compared favorably to some of the greatest dystopian works of all time, including Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921); the early-twentieth-century works of Franz Kafka; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932); and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). At the time of the novel’s publication, Publishers Weekly decreed that The Handmaid’s Tale “deserves an honored place on the small shelf of cautionary tales that have entered modern folklore.” Its sternest critics, including conservative taxpayers seeking to ban the novel from school curricula and liberal writers dismayed by its critique of feminism, have admitted that Atwood’s novel derives its power from an accurate, if disturbing, critique of contemporary cultural norms. Furthermore, the cultural issues Atwood explores in The Handmaid’s Tale—religious fundamentalism, feminism, consumerism, environmental decline, and rampant technology—have become more intensely debated since the mid-1980s, making the novel seem increasingly prescient and relevant. Atwood herself has said, “The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have—as noted in the ‘Historical Notes’ at the end—been done before, more than once.” She adds, “HisCultural and Historical Context
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tory proves that what we have been in the past we could be again” (“A Note to the Reader”). In nearly a dozen interviews and essays, Margaret Atwood has discussed the events and ideas that inspired The Handmaid’s Tale. Readers who remember the era will recognize the novel as a cultural roman à clef teeming with thinly disguised ideas and personalities from the mid-1980s. Decoding their identities is one of the pleasures of linking the novel to its historical roots. Atwood notes that her own lifetime has been characterized by political upheavals and radical social change. The Nazi Holocaust began just before her birth in 1939, and World War II dominated her early childhood. A controversial act of mass destruction ended the Second World War when the allied forces deployed atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Though Atwood may have been too young to comprehend these events, her sense of political injustice intensified as she matured. She was intensely aware of the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s, and as a teenager she devoured Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The political was also personal: “As a college student,” she has said, “I was a volunteer worker with immigrants wishing to improve their English, and my charge was a woman doctor who’d escaped from Czechoslovakia. She was a wreck. I got an earful” (“Note to the Reader.”) The horrors of atomic warfare have evidently so permeated Atwood’s epistemology that she uses a nuclear metaphor to characterize the act of creating The Handmaid’s Tale: Every book is a sort of mushroom cloud thrown up by a large substance of material that has been accumulating for a lifetime. I had long been interested in the histories of totalitarian regimes and the different forms they have taken in various societies; while the initial idea for The Handmaid’s Tale came to me in 1981, I avoided writing it for several years because I was apprehensive about the results—whether I would be able to carry it off as a literary form. (“Note to the Reader”) 22
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Atwood’s family, with its dietitian mother and entomologist father, moved frequently throughout Margaret’s childhood. Some years they lived in cities such as Toronto and Ottawa; for long stretches, they lived in spartan accommodations in the remote forests of Quebec as the family moved to accommodate her father’s career. Although Atwood did not attend school full-time until the age of eleven, she was an early, voracious reader, absorbing everything in sight, including textbooks, best sellers, classics, and popular fiction. She has credited her unconventional upbringing with having given her an abiding respect for both wilderness and education as well as a strong sense of her identity as a Canadian. She began her prolific career as a writer with five books of poetry, one of which (The Circle Game) won the coveted GovernorGeneral’s Award in 1966. While continuing to write poetry, she also turned her hand to fiction, publishing her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969. Since then, Atwood has published dozens more novels, collections of short stories, and poetry anthologies as well as numerous articles and reviews. Having settled in Toronto with her spouse Graeme Gibson and their daughter, she has sustained a long career as one of Canada’s best-known intellectuals. She has occasionally held short-term university teaching positions and has lectured widely throughout the world. The “mushroom cloud” of experience that generated The Handmaid’s Tale began to take shape in the early 1980s, when Atwood says she felt “increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from around the world could not be ignored, particularly the rising fanaticism of the Iranian monotheocracy” (“Note to the Reader”). Her sense that religious fundamentalism—at home and abroad—was a threat to freedom was heightened after she made a brief stopover in Afghanistan in 1978. There she and her family observed the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. At that time, Afghanistan was undergoing a transformation; decades of civil war and a ruinous war with the Soviet Union had left the country devastated and vulnerable to religious fundamentalists. Cultural and Historical Context
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In Iran, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was coming to power and beginning to spearhead a coup d’état designed to oust the shah. While in Afghanistan, Atwood was unsettled when men spoke exclusively to her partner instead of addressing her directly. She marked the absence of women in the streets and marketplaces (“When Afghanistan” 2046). But her strongest impression arose when, indulging her curiosity, she purchased a purple chador, the full-length “veiling” garment that is compulsory attire for some fundamentalist Muslim women who appear in public. Atwood knew that the chador was more than just a garment. I . . . knew that clothing is a symbol, that all symbols are ambiguous, and that this one might signify a fear of women or a desire to protect them from the gaze of strangers. But it could also mean more negative things, just as the color red can mean love, blood, life, royalty, good luck—or sin. (“When Afghanistan” 206)
Though Atwood hoped the chador would give her a sense of freedom— acting as a kind of fantasy “cloak of invisibility” that would endow her with “the power to see without being seen”—instead she found it alienating: Once I put it on, I had an odd sense of having been turned into negative space, a blank in the visual field, a sort of antimatter—both there and not there. Such a space has power of a sort, but it is a passive power, the power of taboo. (“When Afghanistan” 207)
In subsequent years, Atwood’s fears of rising totalitarianism intensified when war broke out in several Middle Eastern countries and there was a sharp increase in anti-Western political rhetoric by Muslim dictators and their followers. “[The Handmaid’s Tale] was conceived,” sums up reviewer Joyce Carol Oates, “out of Atwood’s alarm at the frequency with which she heard, from her American friends, the facile ex24
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pression ‘It can’t happen here’ in response to Atwood’s accounts of ‘excursions into the darker side of religious fanaticism in Iran and Afghanistan’” (Oates). In the early 1980s, Atwood began compiling a file of newspaper clippings documenting the rise of fundamentalist theocracies around the world, including those theocratic movements in the United States that sought to dissolve the traditional boundary between church and state. These clippings, which grew into a commodious “file of stories supporting the contentions in the book,” became her quarry for The Handmaid’s Tale. Ultimately, Atwood argues, there was literally nothing in the novel “that was not based on something that has already happened in history or in another country, or for which actual supporting documentation is not already available” (“Interview”). The clippings enabled Atwood to document the rise of totalitarianism around the world and to begin to imagine specific techniques that governments might use to implement greater controls on their citizens. As Orwell had predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, language was used as a tool to control understanding. In the Philippines, for example, the word “salvaging” became the government-endorsed euphemism for the officially sanctioned murders of political dissidents. And the control of citizens in general was epitomized by the control of women’s bodies. In Romania, dictator Nicolae Ceaulescu’s government took control of women’s fertility, outlawing birth control and abortion. At the same time, Atwood noted that China’s “one child” policy legislated the opposite effect. “I’d followed events in Romania, where women were forced by the Ceaulescu regime to have babies, and also in China, where they were forced not to” (“Interview”). By 1984, when Atwood began to shape The Handmaid’s Tale, the North American cultural climate had become markedly more conservative. In anticipation of celebrating Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the year 1984, social critics busied themselves evaluating the growth of totalitarianism in the world since the 1949 publication of Orwell’s novel. With dismay, they reported that the world was still plagued by Cultural and Historical Context
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oppressive governments and that neither the capitalist empires of the “First World” nor the communist countries of the “Second World” had managed to achieve the climates of peace and social justice that many had hoped would follow World War II. And the “Third World”—the nations we now call “developing countries”—continued to be plagued by economic and political chaos that was the perfect incubator for despotism. Fittingly, Atwood started work on The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin, a setting that perfectly expressed the impasse between political worlds. In the spring of 1984, she notes, she had no way of knowing that “in five years the Wall would topple and the Soviet Union would disintegrate” (“Interview”). In the early 1980s, the United Kingdom, Commonwealth countries (which include Canada and Australia), and the United States all experienced conservative “revolutions” in which new governments defined themselves in opposition to their liberal predecessors. In 1984, Canada’s longtime liberal prime minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau, who had served since 1968, was ousted by the Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney, who achieved enormous parliamentary majorities in the two subsequent elections. The new Canadian conservatism of Mulroney, however, was relatively mild compared to the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister and prime architect of a conservative movement that was to challenge many of England’s socialist institutions and dominate the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 (and, through the government of her protégé John Major, from 1990 to 1997). Thatcher inherited a troubled economy, deindustrialization, and a burgeoning welfare economy. Her reforms of her predecessors’ policies included a return to supply-side economics; increased privatization of previously government institutions; new limitations on welfare benefits; a hawklike, isolationist foreign policy; and attacks on trade unions. The “Reagan revolution” in the United States roughly paralleled the rise of the Thatcher and Mulroney governments in the United Kingdom and Canada. Like Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, a former movie star 26
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who had been governor of California, inherited a troubled economy, a deindustrializing culture, and an increase in the cost of governmental entitlements. Unlike Thatcher, however, Reagan was elected indirectly because of the rise of one of the Muslim theocracies Margaret Atwood had been watching for more than a decade: the fundamentalist Islamic coup d’état in Iran. For decades, Iran had been ruled by the wealthy and dictatorial Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had been installed in 1953 and was supported by the American Central Intelligence Agency. On November 4, 1979, a group of students, incited by the long-exiled fundamentalist religious authority Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, seizing fifty-two hostages. (Six American diplomats managed to escape by hiding out in the Canadian embassy and securing Canadian passports in a rescue engineered by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor that has now become known as “the Canadian Caper.”) The taking of the American hostages, who were held for 444 days, was viewed worldwide as a violation of diplomatic tradition. During this period, the United States itself was effectively “held hostage” as the world was subjected to the anti-Western rhetoric of Iranian leaders. The national prestige of the United States was further damaged when “Operation Eagle Claw,” a secret rescue effort ordered by Democratic president Jimmy Carter, ended in failure in April 1980. The public humiliation of the United States, intensified by the failed rescue mission, ensured Carter’s defeat in the 1980 presidential election, paving the way for the Reagan revolution. It is important to note that Reagan secured the release of the hostages six minutes after his inauguration on January 21, 1981. It was later revealed that Reagan had obtained the hostages’ release by agreeing to provide arms to the anti-U.S. Iranian government. Margaret Atwood has expressed a strong sense of Canadian identity and has always striven to preserve a certain detachment from Canada’s dominating neighbor to the south. Yet Atwood, like most of her countrymen and -women, finds it impossible to ignore the influence of the United States. The 1980 presidential election was also affected by the Cultural and Historical Context
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rise of what was called the “Moral Majority,” an evangelical Christian political action committee that purportedly delivered two-thirds of the white evangelical vote to Ronald Reagan. While this voting bloc was instrumental in helping to defeat Carter, its growth and strength also revealed a burgeoning transformation of the U.S. cultural climate. Founded by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell in 1979, the Moral Majority promoted an agenda that included outlawing abortion, opposition to state recognition and acceptance of homosexuality, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), enforcement of a “traditional” (that is, patriarchal) vision of family life, and censorship of media outlets that promoted what the movement perceived as an “antifamily” agenda. The Moral Majority was not the only force in American society that defined itself in opposition to what had come to be called “women’s rights.” The 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, which had legalized most abortions in the United States, had also provided a target for opponents of feminism. Since the 1970s feminists had defined “the right to choose”—that is, women’s control of their own fertility—as a key underpinning of women’s rights. Now many opponents of abortion focused on abortion as a “litmus test” for conservative political candidates. Many conservatives who defined themselves as “pro-choice” rather than “pro-life” were targeted by political action committees for political defeat, and opposition to abortion became a major “plank” in Republican political platforms. Abortion opponents emphasized the “rights of the fetus” rather than the “rights of women” or the “right to choose.” As Kristen Luker argued in her pathbreaking study Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, evangelical Christian political action groups succeeded in defining opposition to abortion as a key part of Republican identity, effectively drawing all conservatives into their circle of influence. Women’s rights had experienced many advances from the 1920s (when the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote) through the 1970s (when labor and consumer 28
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laws were updated to eliminate some kinds of gender discrimination). At the beginning of the 1980s, women’s rights, which had once been framed in terms of simple equality and fairness, were now perceived by some in the United States as a threat to “traditional” cultural values and especially to the “Christian” family, which was pictured as comprising a breadwinner father, a stay-at-home mother, and several children. The Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would have established that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” was rejected in 1979, when a majority of states failed to ratify it (including some who rescinded earlier ratifications in response to political pressure). Opponents argued that the ERA would mandate taxpayerfunded abortion and legalize same-sex marriage—issues that have become political “hot potatoes” for conservative and liberal politicians alike. A Supreme Court challenge to the defeat of the ERA in 1982 failed to reinstate it, and though it has been reintroduced in every Congress since 1984, it has never received sufficient support for ratification. Meanwhile, President Reagan, who had promised during his presidential campaign to reduce both federal taxes and federal spending, began to implement a series of cuts to the federal budget. Though the defense budget emerged untouched, programs that served primarily women, though they comprised less than 10 percent of the federal budget, accounted for fully one-third of the total number of federal budget cuts during the Reagan administration. As the national murder rate declined, reported incidents of domestic violence increased by 160 percent. Nationwide, government support for rape crisis workers, victim advocacy, and battered women’s shelters declined. Challenges to Roe v. Wade became commonplace at the state and local levels, and Medicare support for abortion was eliminated. Meanwhile, the power of evangelical political action committees increased. M. G. “Pat” Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, has described feminism as a threat to society. In a fund-raising letter opposing a state equal rights Cultural and Historical Context
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amendment (quoted in the Washington Post in August 1993), Robertson wrote, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement. Feminists encourage women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Atwood’s exploration of feminism—from both conservative and liberal viewpoints—in The Handmaid’s Tale is clearly a response to these phenomena. She does not limit her critique to conservative thought. Instead, Atwood confronts the issue from both sides: This is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusions. For example, I explore a number of conservative opinions still held by many—such as a woman’s place is in the home—and also certain feminist pronouncements—women prefer the company of other women, for example. (“Interview”)
At the time of the book’s inception, the feminist movement was experiencing serious internal conflict, not simply about abortion rights but also about the politics of inclusion and the rise of “essentialism”—the celebration of women’s sexual difference, in a sort of positive take on Sigmund Freud’s maxim that “anatomy is destiny.” With characters like the Aunts, who embrace their duties as enforcers of patriarchal law, and Offred’s memories of her feminist-activist mother, Atwood brings up what critic Lorna Sage has called “the tendency in present-day feminism towards a kind of separatist purity, a matriarchal nostalgia . . . [that] threatens to join forces with right-wing demands for ‘traditional values’” (307). Atwood does not hesitate to mock contemporary trends in gender politics. Early in the novel, Offred reminisces about a conversation with her college friend Moira: What’s your paper on? I just did one on date rape. Date rape, I said. You’re so trendy. It sounds like some kind of dessert. Date rapé. (38) 30
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Lois Feuer concludes that The Handmaid’s Tale reveals “costs at both ends of the spectrum in the essentialist debate: the ‘woman’s culture’ that Offred’s mother envisioned has eventuated in the oppression she thought she was fighting in burning pornographic magazines.” She continues: Atwood looks explicitly at the thesis that we are our own enemies; the fundamentalist conservatives who create Gilead by overthrowing American democracy use as a guide a CIA pamphlet on destabilizing foreign governments produced by that very democracy. In like manner, the essentialism of Offred’s mother and her “woman’s culture” unintentionally supports the essentialism of the fundamentalist right. (89)
The novel’s famous dichotomy between “freedom to” and “freedom from” focuses on the sexual freedoms of women contested by feminists and evangelical conservatives. At one end of Atwood’s spectrum is Gilead, where women have few freedoms, but their fertility is respected and they are free from the threat of sexual violence in the streets. At the other end is the “before” society, where women enjoyed sexual freedoms but were often sexually exploited and violated. Atwood undermines the appeal of Gileadean “freedom from,” however, at the end of the novel, when Offred and the Commander go to Jezebel’s. Offred meets Moira and learns that mutilation and forced prostitution are Gilead’s standard punishment for female disobedience. Because it engages politics, biology, philosophy, and history, human fertility is the source of the precipitating crisis of Gileadean society. In Atwood’s imaginary world, a marked decrease in human fertility, apparently brought on by environmental pollution and degradation, has decimated the birthrate, especially among the highest levels of Gileadean society. By forcibly restoring the Old Testament traditions of concubinage and plural marriage, Gileadean leaders hope to increase the number of births, and they rationalize a series of Draconian Cultural and Historical Context
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rules that rigidly sort women according to their biological fertility. As was typical of twentieth-century dictatorships, crisis makes totalitarianism possible because societies will accept extreme injunctions to prevent catastrophe. In the mid-1980s, populations of some animals, notably amphibians, began to decline inexplicably; scientists posited that there might be documented evidence of decreasing fertility among a number of species. This sterility or decreased fertility might be caused by increasing environmental damage (waste from nuclear power generation, pollution, effects of heavy metals). In addition, among humans, population rates in industrialized countries as well as some developing countries (like China) began to decline steadily. These declines were attributed to a number of factors, including increased access to family planning, with couples deciding not to have children or to limit the size of their families; infertility issues caused by women waiting to begin families until their thirties, when fertility naturally begins to decline; and environmental factors. Though Gilead is technologically sophisticated—for example, using advanced forms of surveillance to control its citizens—it is still unable to control this basic biological function. Atwood reminds us that, though each Handmaid receives the finest health care, a nutritious diet, plenty of exercise, and no drugs or alcohol, conception and successful parturition are unlikely, especially in a patriarchal culture that is unwilling to accept “unbabies” (babies with disabilities) or to entertain the idea that a Commander himself might be sterile. “Freedom to” and “freedom from” are also intimately related to what Atwood perceives is an essential hypocrisy embedded in the ideals of American democracy. Though The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in an unspecified historical period, Atwood deliberately set the novel in a futuristic version of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lived while pursuing a graduate degree in English literature from Harvard under Perry Miller, the expert on Puritan culture to whom the novel is dedicated. At the time, she notes,
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I took a particular interest in the Salem witchcraft trials. What sorts of conditions produce a group mentality that so blatantly violates justice and defies common sense, in the name of God and righteousness? What sorts of people benefit from egging such things on? I’ve always remembered the words of one New England divine, who preached a sermon of repentance after they’d all realized how badly they’d been bamboozled: “The Devil was indeed among us, but not in the form we thought.” (“For God and Gilead”)
Her “exile” at Harvard made Atwood aware of the degree to which the United States, with its ostensible philosophy of freedom and equality, has a paradoxical history of oppression and imperialism.1 As Danita J. Dodson has argued: The Handmaid’s Tale illuminates the deplorable irony that a nation established upon the utopian principle of “liberty and justice for all” has also been a dystopia for those humans sequestered and tortured because of differences from mainstream culture. As casualties of a patriarchal-based empire within the national borders, Native Americans, African Americans and women are all examples of peoples who have been historically locked away from the utopian American Dream. (66)
American history, she notes, “is built upon the huge myth that the U.S.A. is anti-imperialistic because of its documented opposition to the totalitarianism of ‘evil empires’ around the world” (66). Atwood uses The Handmaid’s Tale to suggest that “progress toward global human rights will never be possible until nations of ‘freedom’ face their own incarcerated dystopian realities” (Dodson 66). As a public intellectual, Atwood was conscious of engaging with contemporary politics, the history of ideas and events, and literary tradition. She acknowledges that The Handmaid’s Tale is indebted to earlier dystopian writers, indebted to “a tradition,” she notes, “that can be traced back to Plato’s Republic, through Sir Thomas More’s Utopia Cultural and Historical Context
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and the horse’s paradise of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and then through the many literary utopias and dystopias of the 19th and early 20th centuries” (“For God and Gilead”). Like her predecessors, Atwood is preoccupied with the effects of war, industrialization, and environmental devastation, and the alienation of individuals from each other. In their imaginary worlds, surveillance and propaganda allow states to control their citizens, and daily life becomes quantified, rigidly scheduled, and choreographed. Work is efficient but meaningless, and humans live in engineered environments that isolate them from nature and the natural aspects of their existence, including sexuality. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), written in response to the author’s experiences of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, was a major inspiration for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, also written in the aftermath of war and fascist revolution. Atwood notes that, while these texts strongly influenced her conception of The Handmaid’s Tale, her enterprise differs in one key way: The majority of dystopias—Orwell’s included—have been written by men, and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them, they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who’ve defied the sex rules of the regime. They’ve acted as the temptresses of the male protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men themselves. Thus [Orwell’s] Julia, thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer of the Savage in Brave New World, thus the subversive femme fatale of Yvgeny Zamyatin’s . . . seminal classic We. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view—the world according to Julia, as it were. (“George Orwell” 291)
Yet, though the novel is presented through a female perspective, it is more than simply a feminist dystopia, except, as the liberal-feminist Atwood has said, “insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things” (“George Orwell” 291). Like Orwell, Atwood 34
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is very interested in the ways in which language can be used to control thought and, by extension, individual action. Orwell’s “insistence on the clear and exact use of language,” said Atwood, is central to his enterprise. “Euphemisms and skewed terminology should not obscure the truth” (292). Thus, in The Handmaid’s Tale, women are not permitted to learn to read and write. Signs feature icons rather than words; reading in the home is restricted to the locked Bible; “old world” language becomes so profane (and thus paradoxically sacred) that Offred and the Commander feel titillated when they enjoy a secret game of Scrabble. Linguistic coinages such as “Particicution” and “Prayvaganza” echo modern coinages like the word “electrocution,” which is a compound of “electric” and “execution.” As in Orwell’s text, euphemisms control perception; an execution of a dissident is reframed as a “Salvaging,” and biblical allusions enforce the equation of Gilead and the patriarchal world of the Bible (the grocery store is “Loaves and Fishes,” the handmaids’ boot camp is the “Rachel and Leah Center,” and the sadistic female sergeants are “Aunts”). Offred, who is forced to speak rather than write her memoir, still remembers the previous world, where she learned to love language, something we learn about when she plays Scrabble with the Commander and slyly generates such complex words as “zygote.” In her everyday activities, Offred resists Gilead’s propagandistic vocabulary by using blunt, deliberately uneuphemistic language. In one oftenquoted scene, she reframes the ostensibly sacred “Ceremony” by trying to find an accurate term for what is happening to her: My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it; nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. (93)
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Though her diction is crude, Offred is careful to choose the verb that best describes her position as an object rather than a participant—even the kind of unwilling participant that would be characterized by the word “rape.” “At the end of The Handmaid’s Tale,” writes Atwood, “there’s a section that owes much to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s the account of the symposium held several hundred years in the future, in which the repressive government described in the novel is now merely a subject for academic analysis. The parallels with Orwell’s essay on Newspeak should be evident” (“George Orwell” 292). The “Historical Notes,” however, do not outline a theory of language. Instead, they critique the “discourses” of academia, which in the mid-1980s was beginning to become the primary battleground of the “culture wars” over the progressive agenda of “political correctness.” Politically correct or inclusive language adheres to the principles advanced by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the linguistic theory that language possesses the power to shape thought and action. While Atwood was aware that academics were attempting to reveal the extent to which political oppression can be perpetuated in language, she detected a good deal of hypocrisy in their discourses. Thus, as Arnold Davidson has suggested, while “the historical notes with which The Handmaid’s Tale ends provide comic relief from the grotesque text of Gilead,” “in crucial ways, the epilogue is the most pessimistic part of the book,” since “the intellectuals of 2195 are preparing the way for Gilead again.” The academic world, by “recreating the values of the past,” also creates “the values of the future” (120). The “Historical Note” is a spoof of an imaginary academic conference in 2195 at the University of Denay in Nunavit. (While Nunavut is the newest and northernmost territory in Eastern Canada, the pun “deny none of it” is part of the joke here.) Evidently, North American life has changed very little in two centuries. After sifting through several pages of tendentious academic posturing, the reader learns that Offred’s “diary” is in fact a construction rather than the carefully or36
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dered diary of a known individual. Professor James Pieixoto, director of archival research at Cambridge University, has transcribed and ordered thirty audiotapes that were discovered in such far-flung places as Seattle and Syracuse. The “tale” of fifteen sections and forty-six chapters is essentially his re-creation of what might have been. Instead of being filled with excitement about the diary, however, Pieixoto seems to have little respect for the text he has “constructed.” As David Hogsette has argued: The professor completely misreads Offred’s text. He does not understand her perspective; nor does he make any effort to join the audience of her autobiography. Even though The Handmaid’s Tale is a speculative or science fiction novel, the flesh-and-blood audience of this novel must attempt a reading dynamic appropriate for more “realistic” works of fiction. We see that in the epilogue, Pieixoto, a fictitious reader of a fictitious autobiography, does not become a member of Offred’s audience. The epilogue enables Atwood to reinforce a proper reading of her novel, a reading that involves avoiding Pieixoto’s blind scholarly reading pattern and extending beyond our subjective frames of reference, thus simultaneously becoming a member of Atwood’s and Offred’s respective audiences. (275)
Though he “owns” Offred’s text to the extent that he is its re/constructor, Pieixoto holds it fundamentally in contempt. He proves himself hostile to feminism and feminist literary criticism when he makes disparaging remarks about the diary. He expresses a frisson of sexist delight in the homophone “tale”/“tail” and talks salaciously about the duties required of Offred as a Handmaid. He makes off-color jokes about his female counterpart on the panel: The “charming Arctic char that we all enjoyed last night,” he says, is the equivalent of the current “Arctic Chair” that we are now enjoying (312). At this moment, Arnold Davidson has argued, Professor Pieixoto has effectively demoted his female colleague, Professor Maryann Crescent Moon, to the status of “‘handmaid’ to Pieixoto’s ‘central text’” (119). Cultural and Historical Context
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Atwood, who has had extensive experience working within university settings, piles on details that contribute to the verisimilitude of her portrayal of a 1980s academic conference. Signs of politically correct inclusiveness abound: While Professor Gopal Chatterjee, a philosopher from India, talks about “Krishna and Kali in State Religion of Gilead,” the session on The Handmaid’s Tale is chaired by Professor Crescent Moon, of the Department of Caucasian Anthropology at the University of Denay. Yet when Professor Pieixoto concludes his talk by saying, “As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day,” the reader is meant to experience a sense of ironic dislocation. Though the words sound progressive, expressing humility and respect, we know that Professor Pieixoto means none of it.
Note 1. During the 1979-80 hostage crisis, one of the hostage takers emphasized this when he told Bruce Laingen, chief U.S. diplomat in Iran at the time, that Americans had no right to complain because they had effectively taken the whole country of Iran hostage in 1953.
Works Consulted
Atwood, Margaret. “For God and Gilead.” The Guardian, March 22, 2003. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/music/2003/mar/22/classicalmusicandopera.fiction. Accessed October 8, 2008. ____________. “George Orwell: Some Personal Connections.” In Atwood, Writing with Intent, pp. 287-293. ____________. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. ____________. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. ____________. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. ____________. “When Afghanistan Was at Peace.” In Atwood, Writing with Intent, pp. 205-7. ____________. “Writing Utopia.” In Atwood, Writing with Intent, pp. 92-104.
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Critical Insights
____________. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. “Comment: ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Characterized Unfairly by Its Opponents: An Open Letter to the Judson Independent School District from Canadian Novelist Margaret Atwood.” San Antonio Express-News, April 12, 2006. http://www .mysanantonio.com/opinion/MYSA041206_2O_atwoodcomment_116e42b9 _html. Accessed October 10, 2008. Davidson, Arnold E. “Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale.” In Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, ed. Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, pp. 113-21. Dodson, Danita J. “An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Critique 97.2 (Winter 1997): 96-104. ____________. “‘We Lived in the Blank White Spaces’: Rewriting the Paradigm of Denial in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Utopian Studies 8.2 (1997): 66-87. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Feminism’s Phantoms.” The New Republic 194.11 (March 17, 1986): 33-35. Interprets the novel as a warning about feminism’s repressive tendencies. Evans, Mark. “Versions of History: The Handmaid’s Tale and Its Dedicatees.” In Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, pp. 177-88. Discusses Puritanism in the novel. Feuer, Lois. “The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition.” Critique 97.2 (Winter 1997): 83-95. Filipczak, Dorota. “Is There No Balm in Gilead? Biblical Intertext in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Literature and Theology 7 (1993): 171-85. Freibert, Lucy M. “Control and Creativity: The Politics of Risk in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” In Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood, ed. Judith McCombs. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988, pp. 280-91. Garlick, Barbara. “The Handmaid’s Tale: Narrative Voice and the Primacy of the Tale.” In Twentieth-Century Fantasists. Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in Twentieth Century Mythopoeic Literature, ed. Kath Filmer and David Jasper. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, pp. 161-71. Explores how the novel’s treatment of utopia is supported by its structure. Gibson, Graeme. “Travels of a Family Man.” Chatelaine, March 1979, pp. 36, 38, 132-3, 135-7. Grace, Dominick M. “The Handmaid’s Tale: ‘Historical Notes’ and Documentary Subversion.” Science-Fiction Studies 25 (1998): 481-94. Greene, Gayle. “Choice of Evils.” Women’s Review of Books 3.10 (July 1986): 14. Compared to works by Marge Piercy and Doris Lessing, The Handmaid’s Tale critiques radical feminism. Greenwood, Herbert N. Foerstel. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries. New York: Greenwood Press, 2006. Notes how The Handmaid’s Tale was challenged in high school curricula in Richland, Washington (1998), Tampa, Florida (1999), and Upper Moreland, Pennsylvania (2000) for being “an anti-Christian tract,” “age-innappropriate” and “sexually graphic” (pp. 229-230). Cultural and Historical Context
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Hammer, Stephanie Barbé. “The World as It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Modern Language Studies 20 (1990): 39-49. Hogsette, David S. “Margaret Atwood’s Rhetorical Epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale: The Reader’s Role in Empowering Offred’s Speech Act.” Critique 38.4 (Summer 1997): 262-278. “Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Random House (Atwood’s American publisher). http://www.randomhouse.com/resources/bookgroup/handmaidstale_ bgc.html#interview. Accessed October 11, 2008. “Judson Board Set to Write Final Chapter on Sci-Fi Book.” San Antonio ExpressNews, March 21, 2006. http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/MYSA032206_ 01A_book_ban_86b7db6_html. Accessed October 10, 2008. Kane, Patricia. “A Woman’s Dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 185 (November 1988): 9-10. Kaplan, Amy. “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” In Cultures of American Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 3-21. Larson, Janet. “Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy.” Religion and Literature 21 (1989): 27-61. Malak, Amin. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition.” Canadian Literature 112 (Spring 1987): 9-16. Examines how Atwood’s feminist focus distinguishes her novel from dystopian classics like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Neuman, Shirley. “‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale.” University of Toronto Quarterly 75.3 (Summer 2006): 857-868. “Novel Solution in Judson: Board Reinstates Sci-Fi Book.” San Antonio ExpressNews, April 13, 2006. http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/MYSA032406_ 01A_banned_book_1ce7575_html. Accessed October 10, 2008. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Margaret Atwood’s Tale.” New York Review of Books 53.17 (November 2, 2006). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19495. Accessed October 10, 2008. “Objections to the Use of The Handmaid’s Tale in a High-School Class of Minors.” www.sibbap.org/handmaidstale.html. Accessed October 10, 2008. “Poised for International Stardom.” CBC Radio Archives. February 14, 1986. http:// archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/literature/topics/1494-10062. Accessed October 10, 2008. Sage, Lorna. “Projections from a Messy Present.” Times Literary Supplement (March 21, 1986): 307. Stein, Karen F. “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 148 (Spring 1996): 57-73. ____________. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Scheherazade in Dystopia.” University of Toronto Quarterly 61 (1991): 269-79. Stillman, Peter G., and S. Anne Johnson. “Identity, Complicity, and Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Utopian Studies 5.2 (1994): 70-86. Stimpson, Catherine R. “Atwood Woman.” The Nation 242 (May 31, 1986): 764-67. 40
Critical Insights
Sullivan, Rosemary. “What If? Writing The Handmaid’s Tale.” University of Toronto Quarterly 75.3 (Summer 2006): 850-6. Tomc, Sandra. “‘The Missionary Position’: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 138 (Fall 1993): 73-87. VanSpanckeren, Kathryn, and Jan Garden Castro, eds. Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer. “From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Critique 45.1 (Fall 2003): 83-96.
Cultural and Historical Context
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